Prior to the COVID crisis, more than 35,000 workers were employed in the Charlottesville region1 in seven broad industries that have been serving on the frontlines of support, sustenance, and care since the pandemic. They make up 29 percent of all workers in our area and include physicians and nurses, grocery store employees and convenience store clerks, warehouse workers and bus drivers, K-12 school teachers and instructional support staff, and cleaning services, among others. They have always been essential, maintaining services and performing work on which we all depend; they have often been underpaid and underappreciated. In the current health crisis, they are too often under protected as well.
As Virginia begins to ease public health restrictions, the frontline workers on which re-opening depends will be placed in increased jeopardy. Given the disproportionalities in the frontline workforce, the increased risk likewise falls even more heavily on people of color. Our region’s essential workers have a right to health and safety protections, paid sick leave, compensation in accord with the hazards they face, and more.
Community-based advocates from the Equity Center Local Steering Committee, working with UVA’s President’s Council on Community-University Partnerships, propose a Fair Treatment Charter for Frontline Workers outlining a comprehensive set of policies and practices.
People of color make up 26 percent of frontline workers, compared to 23 percent of the overall workforce; this disproportionality is larger for Black residents, who make up 13 percent of all workers and 18 percent of frontline workers.
While frontline workers as a whole are disproportionately people of color, the differences are particularly stark in two industries: 1) Building Cleaning Services and 2) Public Transit.
Though men and women make up equal shares of the overall workforce, 68 percent of frontline workers are women.
In addition
Understanding who these workers are is necessary for developing and implementing protections. This work, modeled after analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (see a description of the methodology below). It describes the characteristics of frontline workers in the Charlottesville region, revealing ongoing economic and social inequities between knowledge economy workers who can work-from-home and essential workers on the frontlines, where they have greater exposure to the virus, who are disproportionately people of color, women, and residents without a college degree.
Key findings:
However, several of these differences vary widely across industries.
The characteristics of frontline workers differ across the included industries – health care workers and school teachers, in particular, are more likely to have college degrees and health insurance than the overall workforce, while workers in other industries fare much worse. The following analysis provides the same demographic profile as above separately for each of the six included industries.
While frontline workers as a whole are disproportionately people of color, the differences are particularly stark in two industries:
Looking at the age of workers by industry,
Within all frontline industries except Health Care and Education, workers are less likely to have a college degree relative to the overall workforce. Some of the differences are especially big. In the overall workforce, 57 percent of workers do not have a college degree, compared to:
Residents not born in the United States (note, this is not citizenship status, but captures individuals who have immigrated to the US) make up 10 percent of the workforce in our region overall and 8 percent of frontline workers overall. But this obscures a big disparity:
While women compose half of all workers in our region, they are 66 percent of workers in frontline industries. Women are distinctly overrepresented in several industries:
Among all workers in our region, 90 percent have health insurance and 10 percent are uninsured. The numbers are similar among all frontline workers. Yet several frontline industries have disproportionate numbers of uninsured workers.
This local analysis was based on the work of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) building from their analysis of frontline workers at the national and state level. The data for this analyis is from the most recent five-year estimates of data from the American Community Survey (2014-2018) [Public Use Microdata Sample0(https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/pums.html). Using only survey data from the respondents in the Thomas Jefferson Planning District2 As the CEPR study notes: “The demographics of the frontline workforce is unlikely to have changed in any substantial way over the last two years, and using five-year estimates of ACS data helps ensure that sample sizes are sufficient to produce reasonably precise estimates by industry.”
Using their initial code, we adapted it to generate estimates of frontline workers and their characteristics for our region. The CEPR analysis defined frontline industries using the same definitions as the New York City Comptroller’s report: direct-service employees in the grocery, pharmacy, transit, delivery & storage, cleaning, healthcare, and social services industries. These include the following industry classifications:
We added to this list
The Bay Area analysis began with the same six industries, and then added in additional industries deemed locally relevant by community leaders, including:
With community expertise and input, we could supplement and revise this analysis further with additional industries.
As both CEPR and the Bay Area anaylsis observe, this approach includes all workers (16 and above) in the relevant industry but no workers in frontline occupations outside of these chosen categories. This means the estimates “exclude some workers in occupations (but not industries) that are clearly on the frontlines, while also including some workers who are not in frontline occupations, even though they are in frontline industries.” As an example, a police officer is a frontline occupation in a non-frontline industry; a school bus driver is a non-frontline occupation when schools are closed, but in a frontline industry. “Still,” CPER notes, “the vast majority of workers in the six frontline industries are frontline workers.”
All of the code to produce this report is available on our GitHub repo.
The Charlottesville region is defined here as the Thomas Jefferson Area Planning District, which consists of the City of Charlottesville, Albemarle County, Fluvanna County, Green County, Louisa County, and Nelson County.↩
In the ACS PUMS data, the TJPD area is composed of Public Use Microdata Areas 51089 and 51090.↩